


One Hand Clapping

by hapakitsune



Series: Winter at Samwell [3]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Double Dating, F/M, M/M, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:04:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2805479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hapakitsune/pseuds/hapakitsune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Does it really count as a double date if only one of the couples knows it’s a double date?” Shitty asks philosophically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Hand Clapping

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to the folks (duchessofavalon, novembersmith) who were around when I was writing this and assured me this wasn't awful!

Lardo is pretty fucking comfortable spooned up against Shitty, having a nice relaxing post-coital morning, when the door to Shitty’s room slams open despite the tie dangling from the doorknob and Drama Queen Extraordinaire Jack Zimmermann says in a hoarse whisper-scream, “ _I kissed Bitty._ ”

Lardo groans and tries to slither further under the covers. To her annoyance, Shitty straightens up, knocking the comforter from her shoulders, and says, “No fucking way.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Lardo says, sitting up – Jack lets out a yelp and covers his eyes – “Oh for the love of God, Zimmermann, they’re boobs, you’ve seen them before.”

“Lardo, why are you in Shitty’s bed?” Jack asks plaintively. 

“Seen them before?” Shitty asks Lardo. 

“It’s a figure of speech.” Lardo leans over Shitty to reach for her shirt, which is draped over the lamp on Shitty’s bedside table, and pulls it on. “Okay, you can look now, Zimmermann.”

Jack uncovers his face and squints at them. “You guys hooked up?”

“Later,” Shitty says, waving his hand dismissively. “Tell us what you did with Bitty.” 

Jack closes the door behind him and collapses against it. “I – it was snowing? He was leaving for home, so I kissed him. I don’t know why I did it, _Shitty_.”

“Look at this, Lardo,” Shitty says, stroking her back in a way that is incredibly distracting to the matter at hand. “Our Jack is learning to be in touch with his emotions.”

“How sweet,” Lardo drawls. She props her chin on Shitty’s shoulder and smirks at Jack. “I wonder who won the pool.” There is no pool, but Jack doesn’t have to know that.

“He’s on the _team_ ,” Jack says, pacing back and forth. “He’s on the _team_ and he’s a _sophomore_ and I’m going to be in the NHL, fuck, what was I thinking?”

Lardo and Shitty exchange looks. Shitty suggests gently, “Perhaps you were thinking that you wanted to kiss him?”

Jack glares at them. “I have no idea why I thought you would be helpful,” he mutters, and he stomps from the room. Shitty glances at Lardo, a grin pulling at his face. Lardo decides that she doesn’t have enough mustache burn to take home and pulls Shitty to her for round two. 

 

In some parts of the world, Lardo is still known as Larissa. 

It’s funny, sometimes. In Kenya, no one called her Lardo for an entire semester, and she almost forgot who that was, the girl who drank as hard as the boys and knew everything about the team down to their blood types because that was her job. When she’s Larissa, she’s an artist, paint under her fingernails and hair, when it was long, pulled up in a messy bun and her stereo blasting dubstep to drown out the sculptors. When she’s Lardo, she’s singing Drake and doing keg stands and owning Ransom and Holster at beer pong. When she’s Larissa, she has long and sometimes obnoxious conversations about the latest Von Trier film and what, exactly constitutes art. When she’s Lardo, Shitty gives her noogies and Jack tells her about the time he nearly fell through the ice as a kid and Bitty bakes her pies from thin air. 

Larissa goes home to visit her family for Christmas, eats her weight in her mother’s _phở_ and _Bánh mì kẹp thịt_ , meets up with friends from high school, and Lardo comes back to the Haus in January to find Shitty face first in a textbook and starts to stroke his hair away from his face before remembering that they aren’t that, not yet. She goes upstairs, finds Ransom’s insane huge headphones, brings them down, plugs them into her iPhone, and holds them up to Shitty’s ears before picking the loudest A Tribe Called Red song she has. 

Shitty sits up with a mangled scream and nearly brains her. It’s worth it just to see him flail ineffectually, shouting, “Who the hell do you think you are?” and “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“What are you doing here?” he asks when she’s stopped laughing. “School doesn’t start for another week.”

“I have stuff to do for the team,” Lardo says. “Dealing with hotels, scheduling buses, that sort of crap. What about you?”

“It’s quieter here than at home,” Shitty says. “And less – annoying.” Shitty groans and tries to reel Lardo in by her jacket. “I missed you.”

Rule number one Lardo created for herself upon becoming manager of the Samwell hockey team: Don’t date the players. 

Rule number two: Don’t hook up with them either. 

She’s already broken rule two seven times with Shitty, assuming you count only nights spent together and not…anything else. They’re rules that she set up because she knows how people talk, she’s not an idiot; and when it comes to Shitty, she knows she’s going to be disappointed eventually. He’s a good guy but she’s met some of his family. She knows what they expect for him: a well-connected girl from a “good” family who can be his support through law school. Not that she expects to get married or anything, but she’d like at least the chance of longevity. 

“I’ll let you get back to studying,” she says, slipping from his grasp. He doesn’t ask her to stay. Sometimes she wishes he would. 

 

Over break, Jack sent Lardo a total of one text message, which said, _Don’t tell anyone_. Lardo would feel insulted, except that she remembers when Jack came out to her in a series of carefully worded text messages. She knows Jack is sensitive about liking guys and that he’s tried to channel his attraction to girls into actual relationships, but nothing has ever stuck. Lardo and Shitty sometimes tell him he just hasn’t found the right girl yet, but Shitty is of the opinion that Jack is homoromantic. They try not to talk about Jack too much behind his back, well-aware that Jack’s life is entirely defined by getting picked apart by people he knows and people he doesn’t. Still, when they’re high and discussing sexuality and love and romance – or when Shitty is discussing, anyway, and Lardo is occasionally putting in her two cents – they tend to circle back to Jack. 

They both love Jack, is the thing, in their own ways. Shitty loves Jack like a little brother, someone even more fucked up by his family than he himself is, and has taken it upon himself to help Jack. He sees the charming person Jack can be inside him. Lardo loves Jack like an older brother, one she can hang out with without saying a word, someone she knows has her back and who knows she has his. And they both see Jack isn’t doing as well as he hopes or pretends. Maybe he isn’t the wreck he was when he started at Samwell, but neither is he ready to leave. This whole mess with Bitty just proves that to Lardo. 

Lardo remembers meeting Bitty for the first time, after hearing all about him from Shitty and a couple of terse emails from Jack about “that tiny skater,” and seeing the way Jack’s body language changed around him. He got tense, like he was scared. But – that had changed, and Jack had eased, smiling more and teasing Bitty with the same relentlessness he used on everyone else. Lardo had thought she was the only to notice. 

Of course, Shitty had noticed, too, and they both had the same information to work from when the rest of the team didn’t. “He’s just, fuck,” Shitty said when they finally finished dancing around the topic and got to it. “I think Bitty scares him, you know? He doesn’t know that this is the first time Bitty’s been out _anywhere_. You know before he told me, Bitty had never said he was gay out loud? That’s fucked up, man.”

“Figure skating’s pretty homophobic,” Lardo said mildly. 

Shitty snapped his fingers and nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “But Bitty comes here and he’s out to us by Winter Screw and Jack couldn’t even tell me until sophomore year when I saw him kissing a guy from the UMass team at a party. Jack spent his whole fucking _life_ thinking he couldn’t have both. And here’s Bitty.”

“Here’s Bitty,” Lardo agreed, and they had clinked beers before sitting cross-legged on the floor to work on the Jackson Pollock puzzle Shitty had bought her as a belated Christmas present. 

And as much as she wants to help, both as a team manager and as Jack’s friend, Lardo had made that rule number three: don’t try to aid or interfere with the personal lives of the players unless it presents an issue to the team. 

Though she supposes this situation could fall under that last bit. But she isn’t going to deal with it. She’s lifting her hands and letting Shitty handle this ball. Jack is a lot to deal with even at his best, and she suspects that having a few weeks in Montreal to stew over Bitty, he’s going to be even more of a weirdo mess than usual. 

She’s proven right when Jack returns a few days before classes start. She gets a text less than two hours later from Shitty that says _HELP_ followed by a screaming face emoji. Bitty sends her one a couple of minutes later that says, _Jack and Shitty are arguing help!!!_ and then he sends a selfie of him with his hands clasped to his face like the kid in _Home Alone_. Lardo bets he got one of the frogs to help him with that. 

It isn’t out of her way to swing by the Haus, so she takes her art supplies over and drags Shitty out of Jack’s room, saying she wants to paint him. Jack has flopped down face first in his bed like the overdramatic kid he is at heart, and while Lardo would like to ask him what the matter is, her tactic with Jack is to let him stew until he’s ready to talk. Shitty is more the type to poke and prod, at least when it comes to Jack. 

“He’s being ridiculous,” Shitty says, taking off his shirt because he’s allergic to fabric touching his chest apparently. “He’s saying he can never look Bitty in the eye again.”

“Stop talking about Jack,” Lardo says, picking up her sketch pad. “Lie down.”

“Yes, dear,” Shitty says, smiling at her. He lies down, stretching his arm over his head like he’s in a goddamn Renaissance painting. Lardo doesn’t understand why she’s attracted to him. 

She likes sketching Shitty, though; she’s always found him a challenging subject. Her sketchpad is full of her classmates and friends and members of the team. There’s Jack, with his cheekbones and light eyes that she always struggles with; Ransom and Holster mid-conversation, Holster yelling something probably and Ransom wearing sunglasses; Bitty, bent over the oven to check on his pies; Johnson disappearing around a corner; Shitty reading; Shitty stretched out on the lawn with a book over his face; Shitty on the couch telling Jack something. Shitty has this indefinable energy that she has never been able to get right. 

Lardo likes trying though, and she doesn’t have to make excuses to get him to pose for her anymore. He’s more than happy to stretch out for her, smirking when she drags her gaze up his legs toward his chest. Lardo rolls her eyes at him and starts sketching. 

“I think we should talk to Jack,” Shitty says sometime later, straightening his arm over his head. 

“Do we have to talk about Jack?” Lardo asks, erasing a rogue line of hair. “He’s either going to learn to live with the fact that he’s bi or he isn’t. He’s either going to learn to deal with Bitty or he isn’t.”

Shitty is quiet for a long time, longer than Lardo expected. She finally looks up and says, “What.”

Shitty sighs heavily and says, “I’m worried about him.”

Lardo searches his face, looks at his slight frown, and sets aside her sketchpad. “You think we should do something.”

“I have a few ideas,” Shitty says. 

And that’s how Lardo ends up on a double date Shitty, Bitty, and Jack Fucking Zimmermann. 

“Does it really count as a double date if only one of the couples knows it’s a double date?” Shitty asks philosophically as he leads the way to the diner in town. 

“What _is_ the sound of one hand clapping?” Lardo asks him. 

Bitty is already there when they arrive, sitting primly on the edge of his vinyl seat and examining the menu with a frown. Shitty pushes Lardo into one side of the booth so Jack has to sit next to Bitty. Bitty frowns at them as they jostle and asks them what on earth they’re doing. Luckily, Jack chooses that moment to arrive, glowering down at the table like he knows what they’re doing. He probably does. 

“Jack, my friend!” Shitty says happily, waving at the lone seat available. “Have a seat!”

Jack, glaring at them, sits down. Bitty presses himself as far into the corner of the booth as physically possible, arms folded over his chest. He gives Lardo and Shitty a betrayed look and then buries his head in his menu again, like he hasn’t methodically gone through and analyzed every single dish they serve. Lardo glances at Shitty and tries to convey, through strategic raising of her eyebrows, that this was a terrible fucking idea. 

Jack and Bitty do a masterful job of not speaking to each other for a solid fifteen minutes during which Shitty talks to Jack about the Bruins and Bitty rambles at Lardo about the choice of putting American cheese on burgers over cheddar or pepperjack. Lardo puts up with it until their waitress has taken their orders and then she crosses her arms on the table and glares at Jack until he looks at her. 

“Jack,” she says, “you have something to say to Bitty.”

Jack stares at her in blank incomprehension. Lardo represses the urge to sigh and looks at Shitty. “Back me up,” she says. 

“I think you two have some unresolved issues to work out,” Shitty says neutrally, in the same kind of voice he uses when making arguments in class. Lardo remembers being in a class with him and being stunned by the lack of profanity. “Why don’t you talk them out instead of acting like whiny shit babies – sorry, Bitty, this mostly applies to Jack – and act like fucking adults?”

Bitty’s arms slowly came down from their defensive position. “Jack, I – I don’t want you to think I expect anything,” he says hesitantly. “But it ain’t my fault –”

“Shut up, Bittle,” Jack says, face tight. Lardo kicks him in the knee, hard, but not too hard. She doesn’t want to injure her star player, after all. “Shit, I’m – Bittle, you’re right. It isn’t your fault.”

“And?” Shitty prompts after a moment. 

“Fuck,” Jack mutters under his breath. He rubs his hand over his eyes, slumps over the table, and says to the placemat, “I wanted to do it. A lot.”

Bitty is quiet for a while, watching Jack with an unreadable expression on his face. Lardo is a little unnerved by it, honestly; Bitty is usually so open, his face an open book, but right now he looks like he can’t decide what he’s feeling. Lardo sympathizes. She’s pissed at Jack for being a dick, but she knows how anxious he is about this kind of shit, and she remembers Shitty telling her about Jack freshman year, what a fucking mess he had been. Rehab had only done so much. 

“I don’t understand,” Bitty says eventually. “You – you like me?”

Jack groans and leans back against the seat, hands over his eyes. “Do you have to say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like we’re in fifth grade,” Jack says. 

“Well, do you?” Bitty asks. 

Jack drops his hands, turns to look at Bitty for the first time all night, and says, “Yes.”

Under the table, Shitty grabs Lardo’s knee and squeezes excitedly. “Our little boy is growing up,” he whispers in her ear, sounding elated. Lardo puts her hand over his, fingers lacing together. Bitty is smiling now, tentative but genuine, and Lardo feels this weird swelling of emotion, like she’s the Grinch when his heart grows three sizes. 

“Let’s take a walk,” she suggests to Shitty, and she tugs him out of the booth, out into the snow, hands still clasped. 

Her first winter at Samwell, she remembers sitting inside the dorm and watching the first snow fall in thick torrents, not the dreamy romantic powder she had envisioned. She was supposed to go over to the Haus that night, supposed to hang out with the guys, get to know them better, beat Ransom and Holster’s asses at beer pong for the fiftieth time. She had almost given up on making it out there when someone knocked on her door and her roommate opened it to reveal Shitty, wearing cross-country skis and a maniacal grin. 

“Come on, Lardo,” he’d said. “It’s only a party if you’re there too.”

“Hey,” Shitty says now, tugging at her hand. “We did good, right? For Jack?”

Lardo reaches up and pushes Shitty’s hair back from out of his face. “I think so.”

“He’s going to be something, you know?” Shitty says, looking back over his shoulder toward the light spilling from the diner’s windows. “He really is. Both of them, actually. I don’t know what, but they’re gonna be something special.”

Lardo isn’t as much of an optimist as Shitty is. She doesn’t always see the good in people like he does, and she knows that she’s the asshole in their relationship. She’s more like Jack than she usually cares to admit, terse and reserved, and yet somehow Shitty loves them both. Somehow they’ve earned him, and for that Lardo is grateful. 

“Hey,” she says, and when he turns to look back at her, she pulls him to her for a kiss. And Shitty, he nearly pulls her off her feet, both of them grinning so hard it isn’t much of a kiss.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [One Hand Clapping [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6498145) by [codeswitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/codeswitch/pseuds/codeswitch)




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